my del.icio.usClockwatching? Use Clockspot to Track Hours
If you bill on an hourly basis or you need to keep track of employee time, it’s often difficult to find out, to the hour, how much time is actually spent working. For example, if someone is working the phones, are they working for the 60 minutes they said they were working?
In a typical hour, did the person work for 45 minutes and spend 15 minutes surfing on non-work-related websites? Did they talk on the phone with personal calls for $50 worth of time, and do work-related phone calls for $10 worth of time? Each of these adds up over 8 hours a day and multiple workers per project.
One way to move around this issue is to estimate projects on a per-project basis, not an hourly basis. However, you run the risk of not estimating correctly: if you estimate $250/hour for a project that takes 10 hours, but it ends up taking more than that time, you’ve lost money. How do you know the actual time spent on a project and what you need to charge to recoup your cost and turn a profit?
One tool to track employee time is to use a Web Time Clock like Clockspot, which is a simple and straightforward way to clock time for workers on an hourly basis. People in the healthcare, construction, telemarketing, mortgage, or financial services industries –or people with heavy call volume like call centers, sales, or technical support– may use this tool to track their hours worked in a flexible and intuitive way.
There is a demonstration link you may use: log in as Warren Buffet or Steve Jobs for added fun, and see how easy it is to specify your workday: it automatically calculates what time it is and asks you to enter the specific tasks you’re working on (e.g. “researching state budget” or “Blogging” or “Payroll” or “business development”). When you’re finished with that task, you simply log it and then turn your attention to the next item on your to-do list.
The results of your entries may be exported via an Online Timesheet which shows what you were working on and what times you were working on that task. The service also aggregates employee records into a large display that breaks down tasks and time by employee.
The service is super-easy to use, and there is no training or installation required. It works on both Mac and PC and the accounts may be accessed from any computer with an internet connection. All the data is securely transmitted and backed up daily, and you may export any of your timesheet data to PDF or Excel for end-of-the-month reporting.
The base fee is $10/month and varies according to the number of employees and managers at your business. There is a 14-day trial and best of all, the service does NOT require setup fees, long term contracts, or cancellation fees. As Jason Ho, the founder, says, “we’re not evil.”
There is also a telephone-based way of logging on, which is the Phone Time Clock version. This allows an employee or someone working remotely (for example, at a job site, or for a cleaning, catering, or plumbing business) to call a phone number and “clock in” this way, with additional safeguards of voice authorization, task check, message check, and voice report as desired.
I recommend this service for those of you who need to keep track of task-related deliverables or hourly work. It’s a great resource for freelancers, companies with multiple off-site employees, or those of you who need to get precise numbers on workflow allocation and employee hours.